This invention relates to attenuators for use with signal carrying optical fibres.
In the manufacture of optical fibres for transmitting optical signals, it is commonplace to include in the silica core (and for some purposes in the cladding) one or more dopant elements such as germanium and phosphorus. It is, of course, critically important to obtain the highest possible optical transmissivity in the fibre core and strict precautions need to be taken during manufacture to exclude contaminants which tend to reduce the transmissivity. Thus, the purity of the source materials (e.g. silicon tetrachloride and germanium tetrachloride) needs to be very high, and the manufacturing process requires strict conditions of cleanliness. There are some known dopants, principally from among the transition elements, which can reduce transmissivity when they are present in one valence state, but have little or no effect on transmissivity when in another (usually higher) valence state. When these elements are used as dopants, precautions are taken to ensure that the elements are kept in the higher valence state to avoid any adverse effect on transmissivity.
In the transmission of optical signals by optical fibres, attenuators are used, for example to equalise optical signals devised from different sources or for the purpose of simulating the presence of a long line when calibrating an optical component or network. These attenuators generally comprise a block of glass with an absorbing coating thereon. Whilst these can be quite satisfactory in practice, they necessarily exhibit up to 4% back reflection in use due to the presence of glass/air interface which results in an increased system signal-to-noise ratio due to light reflected back into the laser cavity. It can be difficult to provide such an attenuator of an exactly required attenuation.
We have now appreciated that optical fibre attenuators can be made very efficiently by modifying the known fibre manufacturing processes in order to ensure the presence of transmission-reducing elements, whereby the fibres so produced instead of being as free as possible of such elements, now deliberately have such elements present to provide significant and useful attenuation properties.